Texas A&M is in College Station. It was one of the town’s residents, Aggie alum Preston Wiginton, who invited Spencer to campus. Because the school is a public university, permission for the event could not be denied, officials said.

In a Monday interview on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Wiginton said Spencer’s message contained some “valid points” that the election of Donald Trump has further validated.

“I think (the United States) was at one time (a white nation),” Wiginton told CNN. “I think the reaction to Trump being elected, and the reaction with the alt-right being popular, is a reaction to it declining as a white nation.”

Virtually unknown just three years ago, Preston Wiginton has become a key white power activist in Russia and the U.S.

He lives part of the year in a Moscow apartment that he sublets from former Klan boss David Duke. His best friends are Russian skinheads. He boasts of pumping $50,000 a year of his own money into the white nationalist movement. He’s tight with the leader of the racist British National Party as well as ultra-right politicians and white supremacist academics in Russia, his adopted homeland.

His name is Preston Wiginton, and his newfound purpose in life is forging international connections between anti-immigration extremists and white supremacists to prevent the populations of “white nations” from becoming what he has termed “a homogenous muddle of sludge.”

A 43-year-old native Texan and former owner of a shipping pallet manufacturing company, Wiginton declined to comment for this article when contacted by E-mail, calling himself “the wrong Goy” to ask for information. “You [the Southern Poverty Law Center] have a political objective to destroy European and Slavic peoples and cultures,” Wiginton wrote. “We can exist only if we live in the yoke of your Judaic system.”

Wiginton first appeared on the white nationalist scene in October 2005, not long after he turned 40, when he attended Hammerfest, a neo-Nazi skinhead festival in Draketown, Ga. It’s unclear from his prolific subsequent blog posts and essays whether he subscribed to white nationalist ideology relatively late in life or was a longtime believer who came out publicly in middle age. Either way, it’s certain that in less than two years Wiginton became a major behind-the-scenes player in the white nationalist movement and the most dynamic American far-right extremist making waves abroad other than Duke, who Wiginton calls a good friend and claims to speak with twice a week.